LR Doesn't Like My WB

[Nytewulf]

I recently discovered that over a hundred images in my LR catalogue had their WB setting changed from "As Shot" to "Auto".  Since I never use LR's "Auto WB" (or auto anything) and the only images that appear to have been changed already had development settings, it wasn't too hard to locate and update them.  Except for the WB, there were no other changes made by LR, and they appear in the history as "From Metadata".

As quick search of the LR forums only turned up the familiar observation that LR sometimes does strange things when re-importing files.

I'm absolutely sure that I didn't accidentally apply an import preset that changed to the WB.

This event was just a bit of headache, but a similar event could have been a catastrophe.  Does anyone know of a way to "validate" the development settings?  Since the setting are written to the metadata, it certainly seems possible.

John

[Mario]

If you let IMatch import -XMP-crs:WhiteBalance tag you can use it for searching, filtering, data-driven categories or in a custom script.

You can enable this tag in the Tag Manager. Do not include the entire XMP-crs namespace because it can clog up your database with thousands of metadata fields per file!

You can perform the same checks, or even setup a custom validation script which checks specific tags for specific values that way. Such things are easy in IMatch 

[Nytewulf]

Since I already had the tag in the database, I created a data-driven category for LR WB.  Oddly, -XMP-crs:WhiteBalance does not reliably indicate the WB of an image developed in LR.  In the library module, LR will accurately indicate whether or not an image has "Auto WB" applied, but it is not getting that information from that tag -- a tag with the value of "Auto" can actually have the WB of a copy of the image that was never touched by LR.  In that case, the tag of the file in LR will be "Auto", but LR will correctly report it as "As Shot", and the tag will still have the value "Auto" even after reading and writing the metadata for that file in LR a few times.  'Tis a mystery ...

John

[Mario]

I suggest you ask Adobe support about if and where LR stores this information. I'm looking forward for the answers you get.

[KimAbel]

I too have  had problems with Auto balance being applied in LR even though I have used As shot or custom! Really annoying.. It has been like this the last couple of months, but I havent gotten the time to investigate yet. I have just swithed to As shot when I discover a file thats wrong. If you get an answer from Adobe it would be much appreciated if you could follow up on this thread:-)

Kim Abel

[Nytewulf]

The good news is that there are people out there who know less about metadata than I do.  The bad news is that they work in Adobe technical support. :-(

However, I checked with a few LR plug-in developers and crs:WhiteBalance is indeed where the WB mode is stored.  All I can say is that here, for whatever reason, while crs:Temperature and crs:Tint agree with what LR shows, the value for crs:WhiteBalance is arbitrary (and regardless of how or why it happened, I find it disturbing).

If anyone else runs into a situation where the LR catalog doesn't agree with the file metadata, you can use Jeffrey Friedl's Data Explorer LR plug-in to select files based on the LR catalog data.

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/data-explorer

John

[Nytewulf]

Just to close this out ...

1. After having had time to examine my files, this appears to have been the result of a bug in LR 5.5
2. While reading/writing individual files didn't put the catalog and external metadata in sync, actually syncing the catalog did
3. WB being changed to Auto was the only development setting altered.

John

[KimAbel]

Im not sure what you are saying John, but I have found out that LR is writing the correct WB in crs:WhiteBalance when I am changing this to a custom value. This is kept as long as I dont do any changes to my metadata in IMatch (or ExifTool alone). I can synhronize the folder and I can read metadata without any change in LR.

Whats strange is that when I do a metadata change in IM (ratings, labels, description or location info) or Exif Tool GUI and then synchronizes the folder in LR, then LR changes the whitebalance to Auto. Really annoying problem!!

Have you seen a bug report on this behaviour at Adobe? If so it would be nice to get a link to the report so that I can look at it and perhaps comment on it. I have not found it my self.

Kim Abel

[KimAbel]

Mario

This case is really strange and I have tried to narrow the problem down a little bit.

I have done some more testing on two particular files and have found that the problem also has something to do with IM. How I dont know:

In lightroom I have set my whitebalance to a custom value. In ExifTool I can see that this value is set correctly at -xmp-crs Whitebalance, ColorTemperature and Tint.

If I now do any changes in keywording in IM Keyword panel and then do a metadata writeback, then the file has to be re read in Lightroom. The problem is that when I do that in Lightroom the value for Whitebalance shifts to Auto. The values in ColorTemperature and Tint stays unchanged!

The reason I think IM also has something to do with this is because when I do the same edits in ExifTool GUI (delete xmp-dc Description and xmp-lr HierarchicalDesription) then nothing is changed in Lightroom Whitebalance. I have also reproduced this with a new IM and LR database on another computer, so its not database or computer specific. So what does IM do with the file that ExifTool GUI dont do? Something triggers Lightroom to change whitebalance to Auto instead of keeping Custom value.

Another strange thing is that I have earlier reproduced this error also in ExifTool, but are unable to do the same thing now. I also have opened a question over at Adobe forum and one person has tried to reproduce the problem with Lightroom and ExifTool direct without luck, but he has so far only tried it on ratings.


Settings:

Lightroom is set to write into xmp sidecar.

In IM Metadata 2 I have set "Protect unwritten metadata" to No. For my Canon cr2 files I have set write IPTC, EXIF to No and Allow create IPTC/EXIF/GPS to No. XMP sidecar file is set to favor XMP sidecar file.

Hope you can take a closer look at this Mario.

Attached in the link is a file with this problem so you can test for yourself.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12694628/Testpicture.zip

Kim Abel


Important edit:

I discovered that after changing keywords in IM then IM also writes "Auto" in the Whitebalance field! I tested this with LR closed so IM (and of course ExifTool) is the only program that has touched the file. So indeed IM are responsible for this change. Perhaps this is some special case with my databases, but it sure would be nice to know what to do in order to eliminate this problem.
Attached is what ExifTool output panel says. As you can see I also have versioning and propagation of metadata enabled, but this also happens with cr2 files without versions. ("xmp without LR/Camera Raw data" and "Don't copy xmp Orientation" is enabled).

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Ferdinand]

I can replicate this.

It's a small thing, but I find it troubling that writing keywords in IMatch resets the WB to Auto in LR, once you re-import the metadata into LR after IMatch has written the keywords.

Of course it's not clear that IMatch is at fault rather than LR.

(I don't re-edit images all that often and so I hadn't noticed this before, esp since I do a lot of B&W.)

[KimAbel]

Good that other can reproduce this :-) Then hopefulle this can be fixed.

Since I can see that the field xmp:crs WhiteBalance is changed when editing keywords, even though LR i closed, I think this is a IM (ExifTool) problem. This also happens when I am changing Description fields and Location fields.

Kim Abel

[Mario]

What changes in this tag?
What was before in that tag?
Where does the WB come from in your files?
Are you using IMatch 5.3.2 with the new ExifTool version?
Please write a bug report. I don't track bug reports made in the Off-Topic forum.